Microsoft has lost about $1.7 billion on Surface so far

Microsoft continued to lose money on its Surface tablets throughout its just-concluded 2014 fiscal year, adding hundreds of millions of dollars in red ink and boosting total losses to $1.7 billion since the device’s 2012 launch.

It doesn’t look like Surface has really been working out for Microsoft. I think the hardware’s pretty great, the software is well below par (as a tablet!), but yet, people aren’t buying them. Combined with Windows Phone’s and Nokia’s inability to make any form of profit, it looks like Microsoft’s ‘devices’ focus has been a pretty big failure. At the glacial pace with which Lumia sales are growing, it might take the company several years before turning a profit and recouping all the investments made (e.g. Nokia acquisition).

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It might take the company several years before turning a profit and recouping all the investments made

If that happens at all. They might not even recoup anything and lose in result. That’s why MS is so desperate to milk Android vendors with their racket patents. Because it’s solid income for them, unlike their failing mobile projects.

MS were also scared that if the court case would have progressed B&N could require disclosure of the patents in question, undermining Microsoft’s protection racket with other Android vendors. They thought they found a smart way to avoid it by making a deal with B&N, but China nullified all those smart plans simply disclosing these patents out of the blue. Now it’s Android vendors’ turn to strike back and try to bust those patents.

Initially MS was going to pay to B&N and also buy their whole e-book / Nook division. That was when they MS attempted to stop the case from moving forward and B&N accepted that bait. I didn’t check what happened since then, but MS succeeded to achieve their main goal at that time – to avoid the patents from being publicized.

The revised agreement scales back the companiesâ€™ relationship nearly two years after Microsoft pledged more than $600 million to prop up Barnes & Nobleâ€™s digital-reading business. In return, Barnes & Noble committed to creating e-reading apps for new computers, phone and tablets powered by Microsoftâ€™s Windows software.

So from 300 Million, the investment was increased to 600 Million and the original agreement has been completely scaled back where B&N is just a content supplier now ? How much have they paid MS in patent royalties ?

Barnes & Noble and Microsoft have settled their patent litigation, and moving forward, Barnes & Noble and Newco will have a royalty-bearing license under Microsoftâ€™s patents for its NOOK eReader and Tablet products. This paves the way for both companies to collaborate and reach a broader set of customers.

Notice the wording B&N and Newco will have a royalty-bearing license under MS’s patents in other words MS has thrown the license agreement in as part of the deal no further payments necessary, they own 17% of the venture so they will earn 17% of the profits I would assume.

a royalty-bearing license may be either paid-up in a lump sum or be a running royalty, where the royalty is based on the sales of the licensed goods or services.

No where did it state B&N would be paying royalty no a joint venture was started called Newco which was 17% owned by MS (which produced nothing) and under the agreement B&N and Newco are protected from MS patents. That is the way the whole thing reads to me…

B&N had raised complaints to the DOJ about a convicted monopolist (MS) trying to shake down companies for Patents – Yeah I’m dreaming up a fairy tale… Nelson I suggest you take your MS supplied rose tinted glasses off.

Now of course, you employ some very peculiar parsing of words to arrive at an unlikely conclusion (that a license to Microsoft’s IP is included as part of their Nook investment, and not in addition to).

However its unclear how you’d arrive at this conclusion and still be able to take yourself seriously. Especially when they state that both Barnes and Noble and New Co have a royalty bearing (royalty bearing being the operative word here) license to Microsoft’s patents.

Microsoft just licensed their patents AND made an investment. Just like they licensed their patents to Samsung AND made an investment. Or HTC. Or Nokia.

The link I posted doesnt prove they paid 1 pence towards royalties it does prove MS paid 300 million to them though for a venture called newco, what a rubbish newco they couldnt even be bothered to give it an actual proper name.

Actually $600 million was [an expanded] planned investment over and above the $310 million out of court payout.

You are correct insofar as that the $600 million investment was scaled back but the $310 settlement payment was not reduced, voided or withdrawn and the initial, unexpanded, $300 million investment payment was made and is a matter of record.

So in actuality more than $600 million has left the MSFT coffers even if B&N has made some undisclosed payment(s) on the royalty bearing license. However, also undisclosed, and speculate if you care to on this, is who the net payor is. Normally this will be specified in any announcements of this type in order to indicate who is the alpha in the arrangement.

While I am not prepared to claim that MSFT is the net payor in the arrangement (nor do I suspect that they are even if it is possibly so) it is a detail that is notable in its absence.

Apparently Microsoft’s longer term investments in Barnes and Noble were scaled back (which presumably lowers the pricetag quite a bit from $600M).

Msft paid $310 million to B&N to settle the suit they brought against B&N.

If, as you note, a royalty-bearing license has reduced that loss by quite a bit, do you have any notion as to what the scope of that reduction is? Or are you just characterizing it that way as a face-saving tactic?

The additional $300 million investment may certainly be viewed as something other than the loss I described it as. That was purely rhetoric

But it was so close on the heels of the settlement payout that it is easy to see why it might be looked at as a secondary payout to help MSFT appear to be investing in a solid business venture. The defect in that perspective is that B&N was losing money on it then and it has not improved since.

So, how much would you estimate that has reduced the pricetag for MSFT? And what reduction in their longer term investment in B&N was apparent to you as I have seen no coverage indicating that less than the agreed amount was transferred.

However, neither do you, and such context was missing from your original comment. I merely added it.

Some conclusions are definitely being jumped to here by some people, but it isn’t me :-).

I do wish you had responded sooner, instead of the merry band of morons in the chain above.

But here’s what I do think, and I believe it to be reasonable. We know a few things:

1. Microsoft paid at least $300M to B&N

2. Microsoft (over time) would pay out up to $600M

3. B&N took a royalty bearing license from Microsoft

4. Microsoft/B&N “scaled back” their partnership.

I think the last two items offset the first two, especially item two significantly. It stands to reason that if an additional 300M spread out over time was in play, then scaled back efforts would affect that.

The magnitude of such efforts is hard to quantify though.

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, these patent licensing agreements are less “shake down” than some would believe here. They’re usually mutually beneficial agreements between companies.

B&N pooh pooh’d a little at first, which is where the controversy comes from.

So far you didn’t demonstrate that all those moves were not to avoid patent disclosure, as well as you didn’t demonstrate that MS gained anything in result. You also didn’t demonstrate that “royalty license” actually involves B&N paying anything to MS. It could as well be completely free for them as part of the deal to keep them silent. Unless you can show the text of the deal – the rest is just a speculation.

Overall all those efforts were in vain for MS, since now the patents are out. If they would have known it then, they wouldn’t have made any deals with B&N at all.

Their press release says nothing about them paying anything to MS. All it says, that they got a license. Their actual “royalty” can as well be 0. But they wouldn’t tell you, since MS would look bad in such case.

Their press release says nothing about them paying anything to MS. All it says, that they got a license. Their actual “royalty” can as well be 0. But they wouldn’t tell you, since MS would look bad in such case.

Say it isn’t so!

Or, just do as MSFT did, and do not say something that would look bad for them. (-;

Losses are ok, if you’re company wide revenue is growing and the losses you’re sustaining support that growth in revenue. If your revenue is flat, or the revenue is in legacy revenue streams unrelated to the losses, that’s bad.

Amazon: Sells devices at cost or for a loss, to grow its book, music, and everything else store revenues. I don’t know if they share the direct numbers with investors, but Amazon probably knows how many ebooks sales it gets with every kindle paper white over a given time period.

Microsoft loses money on surfaces in the hopes that they stop losing money and hopefully earns money from the sale of the devices in the future. The office & windows revenues are not going to be driven much higher by the low volume of surface tablets & lumias.

As far as I can tell, Microsoft succeeded in getting some great exclusive games for Xbox early on. I’m thinking of Halo.

That came from buying Bungie. A Mac OS gaming company.

And yet, despite that handicap, Microsoft were able to turn them into a real game development studio.

Seriously, though, it truly is funny to see an iFanboy bring that up as a some kind of proxy-brag. Especially since the main Apple fanboy sentiments at the time were either: “Bungie are horrible traitors for selling out to Microsoft” or “this proves Microsoft’s Bond-villian-esque scheme to screw over Mac gamers… both of them!”

I never understood all this talk about XBL being better, it might have been right at the beginning of the console generation but mid way through no way.

Practically all of the games were p2p on XBL which requires no server infrastructure and everything was behind a paywall, the only advantage it had was group chat, that was it..

PSN has plus which gives out games on a monthly basis, good discounts and a mass of other benefits but the best thing on the PS3 was that online play was free and a lot of the games Sony was pushing out used Dedicated servers MAG / KZ etc all used Dedicated servers for online play – p2p is just laggy mess compared to dedicated servers.

PS4 / XB1 -> Microsoft is getting its ass handed to it on a silver platter MS is now just outright copying PS Plus, its moved all non-game services to outside of gold ridiculous that gold was a requirement for using your internet connection to access services and its now implementing games with gold again aping PSPlus – its a shame that on line play now costs money using the PS4, but this is directly as a consequence of this myth about xbl being better than psn.

I personally hope Steam OS when it finally releases forces Sony and MS to drop their pay to play online rubbish scheme.

The Dev tools your absolutely right on, apparently the PS3 came with a massive Documentation book and practically all of it in Japanese and the Cell was a pita to develop for.

Also PS3 was really expensive on launch (this is the main reason why XBox 360 was selling more)

I dont even see how the Xbox 360 can be seen as successful, it was plagued with RROD failures which cost them billions to rectify, and before the current gen release the PS3 to Xbox 360 sales were about the same with Xbox 360 having 1 more year sales over the PS3. The clear winner of the previous gen was the Wii, the PS3 and Xbox 360 probably tied in second place, not exactly a real success.

I wonder what they have done right with the 360 that they have failed to do with Phones/Tablets.

Good exclusives, and great timing.

Sega’s hardware business was in the process of collapsing, creating a hole in the market that Nintendo wasn’t going to be able to fill with the direction they were steering themselves.

Interestingly, horrible timing is why they suck so bad in mobile – they got in too early and their phone and tablet strategy was already defined (by Windows Mobile 6 and XP Tablet Edition), as well as defined by the limited technology available when they entered those business.

Not saying that if they entered at the exact time the hardware was finally plenty good enough for mass-market consumption, like Apple did, then they would have enjoyed the success Apple did, but at least they wouldn’t have had to worry about the baggage they already had.

I’m hardly an Apple fanatic (never bought an Apple device, actually), but the iPhone didn’t appear because “the hardware was finally plenty good enough for mass-market consumption” – it appeared because Steve Jobs insisted that his engineering team pack an entire freaking computer into a smartphone with a capacitance touch screen.

All smartphones prior to the iPhone were built with low end hardware. Every article I read expected “an iPod with a phone”. But the iPhone was the first true pocket computer, capable of running OS X with a new touch UI well, and that’s why they blew Windows Mobile and what was left of Palm out of the water.

All smartphones prior to the iPhone were built with low end hardware. Every article I read expected “an iPod with a phone”. But the iPhone was the first true pocket computer, capable of running OS X with a new touch UI well, and that’s why they blew Windows Mobile and what was left of Palm out of the water.

Fair is fair.

And we forget all the other competitors who did something similar? We just forget that a palm pilot was a weak computer without internet? We forget the Nokia webtablets?

pack an entire freaking computer into a smartphone with a capacitance touch screen

Just like LG Prada did – half a year earlier… Though this one had a bit abysmal software, LG didn’t realise of the new possibilities with UI and design.

That’s what Drumhellar talked about, I think – Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, they entered the market so early that the hardware (even top of the line one!) was too weak to give an experience similar to the iPhone. And in the following years, they were stuck with those UI paradigms, with the way their software looked at the beginning. iPhone had an advantage of a fresh start at the right time.

Amazon builds market share by selling items below cost to generate massive revenue (but no profits). It bills customers immediately but pays suppliers 75 days later. In other words it borrows money from suppliers at no cost to create cash flow. It is a totally unsustainable business plan. If they increase prices to make a profit they lose sales. Sooner or later the music will stop and Amazon will go bust.

That’s not far from impossible. They could eventually just bite off more than they can chew, and fail to get those revenue jumps they were hoping for. Additionally as time goes on the amazon android platform may diverge from google android. Leading to higher maintenance and development costs.

Microsoft was forged in a decade where near “monopoly” was possible, indeed it was largely and blissfully not noticed by many.

The world is different. There is a real threat against each and every product – hosting, office productivity, servers, clients, databases, document management, ….. there is no longer any guarantee of revenue.

And their response? They still seem complacent about the quality of their products. If they understood the new world, they’d be fighting every list inch for the best possible products.

neither arrogance nor ignorance. its all been pure inertia. It costs time and money to take huge organizations and steer them in a different direction. Not to mention the monumental effort required to break up fiefdoms built by hard fought office politics.

The Xbox One isn’t doing so hot, either! Latest numbers from vgchartz.com (yes, I know, they are usually wildly inaccurate…but they usually OVERtrack the Xbox and undertrack PS4) show that they are being outsold 2:1 in North America, 7 (yes, SEVEN):1 in the EU, and 3:1 globally…even after releasing a cheaper, $399 sku without the Kinect!

Here’s a challenge for readers, name ONE hardware product, not including keyboards or mice that has EVER been successful at MS! Anyone?

The Surface is an abomination. The horror of Windows 8 combined with underperforming hardware that shows absolutely no signs of innovation, improvements or competitive advantages compared to the state of the art, ie. Apple’s product portfolio.

Think about it…Mac OSX was released in 2001, IPhones have been around since 2007 and IPads from 2010.

Complacency, ignorance or just plain stupidity. Take your pick, but the Surface was released late 2012 and that’s what Microsoft came up with.

What’s next in Micorsoft’s pipline of utterly dumb products? The Microsoft VHS VCR?

state of the art always means the same. Having the best specs that are currently available. So if there is a 4K phone and your phone is not 4K…not state of the art. It can still be the better phone even with lower specs though. I agree that Apple products are really good as they should be when you are only operating in the higher price segments. But Apple isn’t state of the art for most specs at the moment, which is logical because most of their productline is about to receive their yearly update

I stand corrected about multitouch. A friend of mine connected a touchscreen as an external display and the touch didn’t work. I should have realised that was a driver issue, not an OS-issue.

state of the art always means the same. Having the best specs that are currently available. So if there is a 4K phone and your phone is not 4K…not state of the art. It can still be the better phone even with lower specs though. I agree that Apple products are really good as they should be when you are only operating in the higher price segments. But Apple isn’t state of the art for most specs at the moment, which is logical because most of their productline is about to receive their yearly update

I stand corrected about multitouch. A friend of mine connected a touchscreen as an external display and the touch didn’t work. I should have realised that was a driver issue, not an OS-issue.

We have to thank Microsoft for getting everyone indoctrinated with the idea that all software must suck.

The only way to make a purchasing decision for those who don’t know there is non sucky software is by comparing a list of arbitrary numbers. And this is where your ‘state of the art’ idea comes from.

1100×640 vs 1920×1080 on a phone screen is not the same as 320×200 vs 640×480 on a monitor, back in the day when those arbitrary numbers mattered

You are not making sense at all and are now just trolling. Those numbers DO mean something and are not arbitrary at all. They are the reason that a Retina iPad screen is better than a non-retina. Or did you think that there was a 320×200 ipad with a great screen?

“The only way to make a purchasing decision for those who don’t know there is non sucky software is by comparing a list of arbitrary numbers. And this is where your ‘state of the art’ idea comes from.”

My state of the art idea has NOTHING to do with software. We were discussing hardware. Those numbers are not arbitrary and Apple loves dishing them out when they are in their favor

I really don’t think that is fair… The real problem to me is they simply went too far pushing Metro down everyone’s throat – they made a strategic mistake. The hardware has its problems, but the software strategy is where the real problems are.

Metro isn’t really that bad for what it is, which is a touchscreen UI. It can work with a keyboard and mouse, but that doesn’t mean it is compelling for such usage. Likewise, the classic Windows desktop can be made to work with a touchscreen, but it has the same fundamental problem – using it with a touchscreen is just as wrong-minded as using Metro without one.

They made two different environments, each which is optimized for a particular usage model, but forced everyone to have to deal with BOTH of them to get any real work done – not for technical reasons, but to force adoption. They have since backpedaled and corrected this some, but the damage is already done I think.

In hindsight, I think they would have been better served to roll out a pure tablet running Metro at the low end (i.e. RT without the desktop fallback) and spend more time, money, and marketing on getting Office up and running on Metro and trying to earn developer buy-in. They should not have shipped at all until they had a real version of Office (at least Word, Excel, and Outlook) done for it, without that they had no market leverage. Maybe if that worked they could have looked into some kind of unification strategy (i.e. a Surface Pro) but I honestly don’t think that will have ever worked. I was optimistic in the beginning about Metro on the desktop, but reality has soured my enthusiasm quite a lot – I just don’t think it will ever be more than a poor compromise…

Alternately (and probably the better approach) they could just let Metro be their phone OS, concede the tablet market, and embrace the ultralight laptop form factor with a vengance. Be the company for the grownups, tablets are toys, etc., etc. I’m not saying that tablets are toys, I’m just saying a rather large chunk of the market thinks of them as such anyway and they could have leveraged that. Come out with a “real computers have keyboards” campaign and dig in for the long haul. A ultralight laptop with the build quality and attention to detail of the Surface Pro would interest me even now – I just can’t stand the kickstand or the shitty touch covers (they get cool points for being, well really cool – but they are still shitty).

Seriously, I’m sure no one thought this was a good idea 5 years ago, but in hindsight the tablet market is almost tapped out already in the developed world, volumes are either stabilizing or shrinking. Android and iOS already won – whatever money is left to be made will be at much reduced margins for everyone. Microsoft came in so late they would have been better off had they simply stayed away…

underperforming hardware that shows absolutely no signs of innovation, improvements or competitive advantages compared to the state of the art, ie. Apple’s product portfolio.

Again, not fair… If Surface was anything, it was innovative. It was too innovative. They created an entire software stack to support a completely unique form factor (kickstand with near-zero-footprint keyboard cover) and a dual usage model – it was innovative as hell. It just wasn’t all that good in practice…

Complacency, ignorance or just plain stupidity. Take your pick, but the Surface was released late 2012 and that’s what Microsoft came up with.

MS is not complacent, ignorant, or stupid. Their sins are arrogance and sloth. Arrogance in thinking they could create their own lightning in a bottle with such a half-baked rollout, and sloth for simply being too late to the game.

Underperforming hardware? It underperforms exactly as much as all other ultrabooks. Which is to say it performs just like a MacBook Air (but with a better screen), and much, much better than an iPad. Coincidentally, it’s priced just about the same as a MacBook Air. Same price, for the same hardware (but better screen).

The Surface is an abomination. The horror of Windows 8 combined with underperforming hardware that shows absolutely no signs of innovation, improvements or competitive advantages compared to the state of the art, ie. Apple’s product portfolio.

Um, what? By more-or-less all respectable reviews Surface’s hardware has been very good, with great display, good keyboard, the pen working as it should and all. Besides, what is it underperforming compared to?

How about stopping reading between the lines and start reading the lines?

Add a Windows 3.1 to the same hardware and that hardware not underperforms. Add a Windows 8 to a 486 and it underperforms. Hardware only (under-)performs with software. The ‘distinction’ you interpret yourself together does not exist.

In other news: replace that WP with Android and Lumia would sell factors better. It would not underperform 🙂

Surface is sunk costs. But that doesn’t mean they should sink more. They killed the Kin quickly, but Zune died more slowly.

XBox is more of an exception since there is no agility (there are few competitors and long upgrade cycles – years, not quarters). When your only competition is Sony and Nintendo, waiting until one makes a mistake might be a good strategy, and MS starting with Vista was better at DRM than OSes. You can’t play pirated HD-DVDs or whatever they were called.

Smartphones is a mature market. Even Apple will have problems growing share (if not profits).

Perhaps looking at Google might help. Chromebooks are NOT android, nor are designed to be. Tablets and Phones use ARM processors and run Android. Macs are NOT iOS devices. Although there is commonality in the codebase, they are discrete.

Note there is no “media player”. Samsung has the Galaxy Player, and Apple the iPod.

The phone cannot run XBox which cannot run PC. This is not an ecosystem, it is an archipelago. You must write three discrete apps. This is half true of Apple – the iPhone and iPad can share. Google isn’t looking beyond the ARMed devices. The Chromebook is designed to run things in the cloud, not locally.

Microsoft has an opportunity. First, it has the heft to do a TNO (trust no one) device side encryption and then put blobs of noise into its cloud since it doesn’t have to mine the data like Google, and doesn’t have to lockdown the 30% vigorish like Apple. Second, it could create a real common codebase across the devices – ARM, XBox, PC so a mere recompile would port the app, in a boxed environment if needed. And it has the office suite.

I know that this isn’t directly related to the Surface, but I’m using a Lumia 520 with Windows Phone 8.1 and I think it works amazingly well considering its cost. The only thing that I would change about it now is the lack of sideloading of apps.

Part of the reason that Microsoft on the desktop was so successful was that it could run anything. With Windows Phone and Windows RT, that isn’t an option. Forcing everything to go through the Windows Store is slowing down Microsoft’s potential growth with its mobile and tablet operating system.

I personally don’t see the point of Windows RT. There should be Windows Phone and Windows Tablet (and they should be the same OS); Windows Desktop with a touch screen mode; and Windows Server. I don’t see any market for Windows ARM laptops or desktops with Intel Atom processors really starting to hold their own on the low end. I would love to see a low-end Atom based Surface tablet running real Windows.

Microsoft needs to drop Windows RT and the non-Intel Surface devices. Let the Lumia line be for ARM devices.

I don’t think the phrase “well below par” fits in the description. The term “below par” usually means something is very bad, but the summary here makes it seem like the software being below par is a good thing. The only time “below par” is desired is in golf where low scores are the intended outcome.

Subtract the Surface RT abomination from that 1.7B and the Surface situation doesn’t look so bad.

The industry is in a learning period where nobody knows what the final form factors will look like. Spending big now to figure this out is worth it. It’s a race!

I think the Surface 2 design is a nice executive niche. But I think the final form factors will be a big phone for most, plus a small Yoga-style laptop for some, and a big desktop for the hardcore. This is being proven out by how the average phone size has not stopped growing year-over-year, and Yoga is the most-cloned design this year.

Things will start looking difference this Q4+ when Broadwell designs can also take Atom chips. High and low-end designs will share parts with each other, and more awesomeness will reign.

C’mon… You all just want to bash. How many of you have actually spent time USING a Surface?

It’s NOT an iPad. It’s not SUPPOSED TO BE an iPad. As a competitor to the iPad, no doubt it blows. But it’s not a very good competitor to a web server either. So what.

Compare the Surface to any other UltraBook running any operating system. It’s actually very good. It’s the smallest, lightest, laptop around. And “bad hardware”? I don’t THINK so. I’m able to run Visual Studio, VMWare Workstation (running a Windows 8.1 VM), Outlook, and WinDbg all at the same time, with no apparent sluggishness. And this is on a Surface Pro 1.

As far as the universal hatred for Metro… get over it. Please. You log in, you go directly to your desktop, and you’re good to go.

I know haters gotta hate. I get that. But if you need a Windows system that’s light and portable and fully capable… I think it’s a pretty terrific piece of kit.

Why is Microsoft sticking around writing OSes for ARM devices? Because Microsoft and Qualcomm have had a working partnership for years now such as Microsoft’s phones basically being tied to Qualcomm ARM SoCs. When Ballmer and Microsoft stopped giving the keynote at CES who was the successor who Ballmer made an appearance with? It was Qualcomm’s CEO Jacobs.

I think Qualcomm really wants Microsoft to stick around and will give it some deals to keep enabling some fairly cheap Lumias. The reason is that Qualcomm in many markets such as the US has won being the major supplier of LTE baseband chips and often the accompanying ARM SoC. And no one in the US is going to challenge them henceforth. So think about the so-called Internet of Things, what will it look like. Well the major things to be connected to the Internet will probably be by wireless, and the best candidate is LTE and its successors. So all the big items in the Internet of Things in the US will have a Qualcomm ARM SoC and LTE baseband chip.

But what Qualcomm does not have is its own OS. And I believe that although Google’s Android looks like a strong candidate to be that OS, Qualcomm would not like to be totally dependent on Google’s whims. The best way to keep choice open is to keep Microsoft in the game.

And Broadcom forced a patent settlement with Qualcomm in 2008 with Broadcom getting the payments. But Broadcom apparently did not get the crown jewels of enough cross-licensing to keep their division afloat.

One can argue Intel has more than enough money to endure losses on R&D in LTE for quite some time, but the company has shown it can be quite ruthless pruning the lower-performing 10 per cent as it does its workforce. And the same financial considerations that apply to Broadcom could apply to Nvidia.

Intel is known to move slowly. So far it doesn’t look like they abandoned their plans for Atom to challenge the ARM world. And Nvidia owns Icera which produces baseband chips. CDMA is going to die out at some point. They don’t need to bother with it – demand for LTE will only grow. So I think there are good chances for stronger competition there. Qualcomm is one of the nastiest companies amongst chip makers, and having more alternatives would be good.